Skulls are a recurring motif in de Medici’s work. They refer to her practice as a tattooist, and her engagement with seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings, known as vanitas or memento mori, which is Latin for ‘remember, you must die’. In each of these watercolours, a skull is covered in moth scales, which signify nature, with the uncomfortable pairing representing the divisions we have driven between ourselves and the natural world.

Skull (Blue and Green) 2004 features the ‘pelt’ of an unclassified north Queensland moth whose habitat was threatened by a planned US missile base, with the red-and-white stripes denoting the American flag.